LITERATURE SEARCH METHODOLOGY
We performed a PUBMED (National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD) search of all relevant articles published in the English language till December 2013, using the key words ‘choroid’, ‘choroidal mass’,‘uvea’, ‘uveal tract’, ‘eye’, ‘ocular’, ‘orbit’, ‘cancer’, ‘carcinoma’, ‘tumor’, ‘lung cancer’, ‘lung carcinoma’, ‘bronchogenic carcinoma’, ‘NSCLC’, ‘SCLC’, ‘lung tumor’, ‘bevacizumab’, ‘intravitreal bevacizumab’, ‘Avastin(R)’. Two authors (NS and VNM) screened these citations, without blinding, by title and abstract review to identify the relevant studies. Any disagreement was resolved by discussion between the authors. Animal case reports, in vitro studies, reports of human patients with ocular involvement other than choroidal metastasis, reports on the use of systemic bevacizumab and reports that did not contain original case reports (including review articles, editorials) were excluded after the initial review. The remaining database of citations was then reviewed in detail and the full text of each citation was obtained if available. We excluded reports in which IV-Bev was used to treat choroidal metastasis from tumors other than lung cancer. All cases of lung cancer with choroidal metastasis in whom IV-Bev was used were then included for further review.
Data extraction:
Data were recorded on a standard data extraction form. From the selected cases, the following data were gathered when available: a) publication details (title, authors, year of publication, journal name, and other citation details); b) number of cases reported in each publication; c) demographic details of each case including age, sex, and smoking history; d) location of ocular lesions (side involved); f ) tumor size and extension (T) and lymph nodal involvement (N) status; h) chemotherapy and/or targeted therapy administered before the diagnosis of choroidal metastasis and the regimen used along with IV-Bev, i) dose of IV-Bev used and the number of cycles given j) response to ocular therapy and second line regimen used. To achieve uniformity in assessment, we used the 7th edition of the TNM Classification of malignant tumors.
LEGENDS TO SUPPLEMENTARY FIGURE
Supplementary Figure 1:Flow diagram showing the selection process for this systematic review.